Beards by which best you may be known as men?
Unless, indeed, you're planning now some deed
Unworthy of the character of men.
And Diogenes, when he saw some one once whose chin was smooth, said, 'I am afraid you think you have great ground to accuse nature, for having made you a man and not a woman.' And once, when he saw another man, riding a horse, who was shaved in the same manner, and perfumed all over, and clothed, too, in a fashion corresponding to those particulars, he said that he had often asked what a Ἱππόπορνος was; and now he had found out. And at Rhodes, though there is a law against shaving, still no one ever prosecutes another for doing so, as the whole population is shaved. And at Byzantium, though there is a penalty to which any barber is liable who is possessed of a razor, still every one uses a razor none the less for that law." And this is the statement of the admirable Chrysippus.
BEAUTY.
19. But that wise Zeno, as Antigonus the Carystian says, speaking, as it should seem, almost prophetically of the lives and professed discipline of your sect, said that "those who misunderstood and failed rightly to enter into the spirit of his words, would become dirty and ungentlemanlike-looking; just as those who adopted Aristippus's sect, but perverted his precepts, became intemperate and shameless." And the greater portion of you are such as that, men with contracted brows, and dirty clothes, sordid not only in your dispositions, but also in your appearance. For, wishing to assume the character of independence and frugality, you are found at the gate of covetousness, living sordidly, clothed in scanty cloaks, filling the soles of your shoes with nails, and giving hard names to any one who uses the very smallest quantity of perfume, or who is dressed in apparel which is at all delicate. But men of your sect have no business to be attracted by money, or to lead about the objects of their love with their beards shaved and smooth, who follow you about the Lyceum—
Thin, starved philosophers, as dry as leather,
as Antiphanes calls them.
20. But I am a great admirer of beauty myself. For, in the contests [at Athens] for the prize of manliness, they select the handsomest, and give them the post of honour to bear the sacred vessels at the festivals of the gods. And at Elis there is a contest as to beauty, and the conqueror has the vessels of the goddess given to him to carry; and the next handsomest has the ox to lead, and the third places the sacrificial cakes on the head of the victim. But Heraclides Lembus relates that in Sparta the handsomest man and the handsomest woman have special honours conferred on them; and Sparta is famous for producing the handsomest women in the world. On which account they tell a story of king Archidamus, that when one wife was offered to him who was very handsome, and another who was ugly but rich, and he chose the rich one, the Ephori imposed a fine upon him, saying that he had preferred begetting kinglings rather than kings for the Spartans. And Euripides has said—
Her very mien is worthy of a kingdom.[24]